Big Content wants to bring SOPA-style policies to Canada

Anti-piracy efforts in the United States have been so successful that they should be imported to Canada. At least, that's the view of the Canadian Intellectual Property Council, an arm of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce that represents the interests of major content companies in Canada. A white paper urges Canadian policymakers to introduce domain seizures, criminal prosecutions and asset seizures of online sharing sites, and even SOPA-style regulation of intermediaries.

Anti-piracy efforts, the report says, are "increasingly occurring through partnerships with 'online intermediaries.' Typically, positive relationships between rights holders and these intermediaries, including online payment processors, search engines, Internet service providers, online advertisers, online retailers, web auction sites, web hosting providers, domain name system (DNS) registries, and social media platforms, can provide the basis for cooperation in the prevention of counterfeit distribution."

And, in the view of the CIPC, "This relationship requires the support of government. The existence of remedies that include blocking orders, domain seizure, and contributory liability are useful tools to encourage the cooperation of intermediaries who do not wish to be involved in the illicit activity."

The group wants to "amend Canadian law to introduce the ability to obtain injunctions against third-party intermediaries."

The group also calls for new measures to fight the shipment of counterfeit goods—with minimal judicial oversight. For example, it advocates "new remedies and approaches that can address the challenge of small shipments of counterfeit goods that do not require the rights holder to obtain a court order to suspend each and every shipment."

The United States government has a growing number of officials whose full-time job is copyright and trademark enforcement. The CIPC wants to import that strategy to Canada as well. It urges the government to "create an interagency intellectual property council" and "establish a specialized IP crime task force." And the group wants the Canadian government to "proactively engage in facilitating discussion" between rightsholders and ISPs in Canada, with the aim of adopting a US-style graduated response system.

The Canadian copyright scholar Michael Geist calls it "the most extremist IP policy document ever released in Canada." Geist points out that the report repeats thoroughly discredited statistics that exaggerate the costs of counterfeiting and online file sharing.